Beauty and belief in ‘The Idiot’
In “The Idiot,” Dostoyevsky demonstrates that honesty is the ultimate sophistication and the problems of existence are spiritually discerned.
“Beauty will save the world,” is that odd moment in literature when fiction is stranger than fact. The unlikely prophecy in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, “The Idiot,” is sometimes weighed into public addresses, most recently by Pope Francis, for an optimistic finish.
But it is difficult to imagine just how beauty will save the world from landing into hell in a handbasket.
Where it is a force rather than just a form, beauty is hardly a virtue.
In more familiar traditions, beauty infamously beats liquor as the demise of saints, kings, poets, generals and wise men.
Back in school, sisters of a feminist temperament and brothers of a populist leaning despaired at how each arts subject seemed to trace the undoing of a fine man to a fallen beauty, say Cleopatra, Gomer or Antoinette.
Poetry would be incomparably poorer without Beatrice, Fanny, Maud, even Solomon’s Shunamite muse, but it is not easy to see how beauty is transferable to the apocalypse.
However, the legendary Russian novelist, flustered by his crushworthy stenographer on the eve of his major novels, insists on a title role for beauty in the great drama of existence.
“Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world,” Dostoyevsky insists that history is coded in the human spirit’s impressions of beauty.
And just how has that thirst for beauty, supposedly surpassing the promises of science and economics, made the calendar of history a permanent winter with only brief interludes of warmth?
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man,” Dostoyevsky explains in “The Brothers Karamazov”.
Both good and evil are playing on mankind’s vulnerability and duplicity, equally present in our limited impressions of the transcendent materials of life
elief and resignation, the spiritual and the visual, the essential and the aesthetic, the profound and the profane, higher nature and lower nature are occasionally blending into each other in our quest for definitive beauty.
Dostoyevsky’s novels approach beauty’s finely detailed conquest of the human spirit with disturbing eloquence.
“If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of beauty, man would pine away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies.”
“Beauty will save the world” is clarified in a letter where Dostoyevsky holds forth to a friend that to save the world, Christ chose beauty instead of bread: “And as Christ, the ideal of beauty in Himself and His Word, He decided it was better to implant the ideal of beauty in the soul.
“If it exists in the soul, each would be the brother of everyone else and then, of course, working for each other, all would also be rich. Whereas if you give them bread, they might become enemies to each other out of boredom,” writes Dostoyevsky.
These otherworldly convictions may come across rather oddly in a fast century, where intelligence is increasingly regarded as burning the bridges between science and sentiment.
Many are already convinced that poetry and philosophy are environmental hazards which do not merit the trees cut to print them, content to imagine humanity as a subset of cosmology.
But the tensions of the human spirit cannot be tabulated in the laboratory, hence Dostoyevsky’s reminder in “The Idiot” that “the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
Dostoyevsky is in that league of old masters and disruptive innovators who never cease to be intellectually fashionable.
Reading “The Idiot” and watching a Hollywood impression of “The Brothers Karamazov” recently, I felt that the genius of art is not so much knowing what others do not know, but feeling differently what others already know.
In “The Idiot,” Dostoyevsky demonstrates that honesty is the ultimate sophistication and the problems of existence are spiritually discerned.
Dostoyevsky, sometimes calls out for an irrational temperament, showing that reason is not the principal force of life as it only interprets what passion creates. And so art becomes super-rational rather than irrational.
He is alert to questions dividing the public square, compassionate in his handling of human suffering and transcendent in his quest for meaning in ways that will startle the musically tone-deaf.
For the novel’s tragic hero, Prince Muishkin, atheism is faith in a negation, originality is misrepresented, capital punishment is not morally sustainable and life just a little more complex than conventional reason.
Weighing deeper into nether zones of religious controversy, the prince contends that Western Christendom has piled on essential Christianity more harm than good, and atheism is the progeny of Catholicism’s imperial ambi- tions, positions generally consistent with Dostoyevsky’s outspoken convictions.
The enduring value of the novel is its honesty, indulgence of human weakness and insistence on locating high ideals in lowly roles.
Muishkin is a positively good man in a superficial, egoistic and materialistic society.
His honesty, simplicity and goodness, anti-clockwise qualities in dark times and his poor health earn him the idiocy tag.
The prince is likened to Christ for his warm heart and vast intellect and humanised by Dostoyevsky’s own infirmities, particularly epileptic seizures and troubled liaisons.
Having dared the novel’s prohibiting length, optimistic for wedding bells, the reader is disappointed to realise that such a fine man as Muishkin has no place in a cruel world.
His love for a fallen woman, insistent on redeeming her from suffering at the expense of his aristocratic prospects, popular approval and peace eventually tear him apart. We leave him in a mental asylum at the close of the novel.
The plot imitates Christ’s forfeiture of divine glory to share human suffering and pay the price for mankind’s sins.
As in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”, the world is presided over by institutions of desperate duplicity, which can only allow righteousness a free course at their own expense.
Originality and its political economy, is a recurring concern in the novel, personified by the prince, misappropriated by rival suitors and contenders to his estate.
Dostoyevsky moves from this position to launch occasional broadsides at the subversive ferments of his day.
Russia was on the verge of becoming the world’s officially atheist state, a possibility which preoccupied Dostoyevsky with atheism and nihilism in major novels such as “Demons,” “Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov”.
It is impossible to overrate originality, but almost impossible to attain it.
Cultures of negation such as atheism, nihilism and post-modernism recruit on their supposed originality, independence and free thought.
The “pope of the atheists” Richard Dawkins, remarks: “Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.” Of course, such noise can go so far as to drown out coherence and clarity.
Mystical novelist John Bunyan said once one credits himself with humility, he would have lost it. Originality is equally elusive. Once you have a template for it, you have lost it.
For Dostoyevsky, nothing is simpler than for the commonplace man to revel in the conviction of his own originality.
“Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles and call themselves nihilists.
“By doing this, they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own,” says the tedious narrator of “The Idiot”.
“Others have but to read an idea of somebody else’s and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain,” he debunks the political economy of free thought.
Recently, Pew Research Centre announced more religiously unaffiliated people in Britain than those who identify with a faith.
Observers are surprised that faith is concurrently on the rise in regions “Christianised” by the West, particularly Africa, disappointed that the developing world should be stuck with relics former oppressors have outgrown.
But, as clergyman Giles Fraser observes, religion in the West is a casualty of the individualism and materialism that comes with affluence, hardly a spiritually rewarding direction for any nation.
Dostoyevsky’s observation that authoritarian socialism, which enforced atheism, sought to “replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force” can be corroborated by the case studies of Russia, China, Cambodia and France.
Political conquests legitimated by religious insignia, chiefly crusades, inquisitions, slavery, colonialism and terrorism, have facilitated unbelief by encouraging many to “condemn a philosophy by its abuse”.
“The pope has seized territories and an earthly throne and has held them with the sword. And so the thing has gone on, only that to the sword they have added lying, intrigue, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, swindling; they have played fast and loose with the most sacred and sincere feelings of men,” the prince blames imperial Christendom as the progenitor of atheism.
For the untainted world, presently in fervour for the religion the West has “outgrown,” Dostoyevsky assigns the role of shining forth “upon the Western nations, our Christ whom we have preserved intact and whom they have never known,” not as slaves but as free people.
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